SGOTM 18 - Kakumeika

[Sun Tzu Wu]

Thanks Deckhand!

I also think we should have hit Members Only harder or later with steam power (hindsight). Not sure we could have gotten the other two islands much earlier, since they required Astronmy. In any case, these three islands could have provided everyone of our cities good trade routes.

The above is a really minor point though. As WastinTime points out, one critical bit of bad luck was getting the GE about 20 turns after we could have used him to found Mining Inc.

What also hurt was in my opinion a slight delay in starting our first war with Genghis Khan and not immediately attacking Joao II with all our military (we probably should have left Members Only until later).

Congratulations to all Kakumeika team members. Despite a few mistakes and bad luck we played really well and really enjoyed this SGOTM scenario!

Sun Tzu Wu

 

[soundjata]

Excellent game guys
The cohesion is strong in your team!

 

[pomthom]

Great game guys

The competition was incredible, a very good read for us lurkers

I think going Mining Inc was very clever, too bad it didn't work out exactly like you wanted...

 

[Pollina]

Excellent game, as usual! You guys probably had the best strategy. Too bad you got so unlucky with the GE.

@Kaitzilla

I am furiously tracking down the math for getting 650->45 precisely, but still haven't found it yet.

The deviations from your calculations are due to rounding.

Spoiler :

650*(0.6*0.51*0.5*0.53*1.06)= 55.87

The actual formula is:

floor(650*floor(floor( floor(floor(floor(100*0.6)*0.51)*1.06)*0.5)*0.53)/100)= 45

 

[Seraiel]

Just flew over the last pages of TSR and PD.

Seems like TSR's Mansa contributed a lot more Beakers than our Mansa did and don't know yet, how PD managed to be 4T faster, they even conquered their Mansa's cities.

Just wanted to thx everybody. Without you guys, I would have quitted after the 1st turnset. I think I know you a lot better know and that we've become closer friends than we were before.

I hope noone holds any grudge against me for having been mean at some occasions, you can be sure that I truely gave my best, my all and commited more to the SGOTM than I ever had planned or even wanted. The last is because you are awesome .

Should you all play another SGOTM, I'd be willing to do so aswell, because there's still a goal for us. Maybe then, with less suffering and more fun .

Seraiel

 

[Sun Tzu Wu]

Thanks for the kind comments about our team effort! It is greatly appreciated.

I agree with Seraiel in his post above. We want to keep going at least until we win gold. Then, perhaps we can think about retiring.

Sun Tzu Wu

 

[Mitchum]

Great game, guys! I wasn't able to follow along during your end game as the action unfolded because we were still playing, but it looks like you guys pulled out an incredible victory even though some pretty big hurdles popped up down the stretch. Nicely done!

 

[Htadus]

Congratulations guys. The top three definitely set very high standards. well done.

 

[WastinTime]

So ~3 months ago when I did my end-game testing I learned that we can win the game 25 turns after we get Mining Inc. The results are in:
T161 Mining Inc
T186 Win

25 turns! Nailed it.

In hindsight, with Liberalism (and of course if we had gotten a GE ) We could have gotten:

T146 Steam + corporation
T148? Liberalism (free Railroad) Mining Inc
T173 win

To do this we would have probably also needed to carefully save our Prophet, and Artist for a 4-person Golden Age.

 

[Mitchum]

It's interesting that Mining Inc. could be that strong in a non-Space game. I know that Mining Inc. pays back really fast, but we didn't even consider it in this game.

I'm not sure how your great people generation was done but I find that if my strategy hinges on getting a GE that I cultivate one at 100% from very early on, usually via a forge engineer specialist + HG and/or Mids. Otherwise you leave it to chance...

When I have done this in the past, either the GE comes early (i.e. 200 or 300 GPPP) and sits on ice for 1000+ years or I end up sacrificing great people generation (i.e. not getting enough GSs/GMs early on when they are more useful) just so that the GE comes at the 400 or 500 GPP mark.

What did you guys do in this game? Did you get unlucky by getting a non-GE at low odds or did you try for several non 100% GEs hoping that one would pop?

I think with our strategy, we could have shaved ~5 turns off our finish date with a few changes. It would be interesting to see if a sub T170 win was possible...

I think avoiding Liberalism hurt you guys in a couple of ways. You were unable to unlock Communism for a long time (the GSpy was gravy but we were after State Property) and you failed to get a juicy tech for free. Sure, you got to run OR/Pacifism + a religion, but the +10% boost to research with Free Religion isn't too bad a compromise unless your strategy depended on Pacifism/GPP generation.

 

[Kaitzilla]

We tried to pop 15% GE's all game it felt like.
In the middle of the game we had a good 55% chance, but it failed too.
With Mids and Hagia already completed at the game start, couldn't stack GE points in a single city.



We needed Pacifism to finally get the GE that we did, but we had to avoid Liberalism to do it.

There was also concern that 20,000 would be hard to generate in time.

Was Communism beeline really the better choice? We got up to +30 with our 30 resources doing some clever Gandhi gift cities on top of gold and such.
So each city with a Coal Plant was cranking out a very sweet +60

Would have loved to have Liberalism'd Railroad with earlier GE. Heck with concerns.
Instead, slow teched Assembly Line and then Railroad. Got the GE 1 turn before Railroad completed and spent 2 turns walking him up to Ironworks city.



You guys had a functional Gandhi? Ours never would expand
I wish we had bribed our Gandhi to make Peace with Goldmember as soon as we got Alphabet. Forgot that Goldmember was probably sending armies up the railroad to murder him all game.

 

[Mitchum]

Was Communism beeline really the better choice? We got up to +30

+30H base or +30H after bonuses? I don't recall that many Mining Inc. resources on the map but we never really considered it so I didn't pay that much attention. Edit: I see that you edited your message and there were in fact that many.

In my opinion, Mining Inc wins hands down in a Space game because there is still a long way to go post Mining Inc. However, in this game it didn't have as much time to catch up.

So was Mining Inc. worthwhile? Yes!!! You guys proved that. Was State Property worthwhile? Yes! We proved that. Maybe the optimal choice lies somewhere in between. Beeline Mining Inc. with a 100% GE (Liberalize RR?) and then go for Communism since it's just one tech away. EDIT: Communism for the GSpy + Intelligence Agencies.

We knew that SP was coming around the corner, so we built way fewer CHs than you guys did. So our economy was in really bad shape pre-SP. On the turn we learned Liberalism + Communism, we settled something like 10 cities in the next 2 or 3 turns and we were able to crank up our economy. If we had more workers to convert farms to watermills and workshops, it could have been an even bigger boost. We finally got the idea and built something like 15 workers in 3 or 4 turns so that we could catch up with workers turns but we still had work to do with just 5 turns of research left.

In hindsight, we missed something by not considering Mining Inc and you guys missed something by avoiding Liberalism (and thus Communism EDIT: Forget the Mining Inc. + SP since you can't run both.) for so long. I'm not sure how doable it would have been to get a 100% GE though, so maybe Pacifism was required.

 

[Kaitzilla]

Excellent game, as usual! You guys probably had the best strategy. Too bad you got so unlucky with the GE.

@Kaitzilla

The deviations from your calculations are due to rounding.

Spoiler :

The actual formula is:

floor(650*floor(floor( floor(floor(floor(100*0.6)*0.51)*1.06)*0.5)*0.53)/100)= 45

650 * (0.07) = 45.5, truncate down to 45, yes!
Thank you Pollina

What awful code! I've never seen such abuse to the very idea of what rounding represents!
Truncating each multiplier over and over again, no wonder our estimates were always high.

 

[Mitchum]

There was also concern that 20,000 would be hard to generate in time.

Hmmm... Communism opens up the best EP infra you can build (Intelligence Agency = 8 EPs + 50% EPs) and gives a free GSpy. That could have helped a bit.

I forgot that SP also provides +10% production. Not a major deal, but good for +2 to +4 hammers/city.

 

[Kaitzilla]

Thanks also to Ghpstage for solving how much AI will be available for trade each turn

It helped us predict how to squeeze Mansa like a juicy lemon after he'd do a trade mission.

 

[ChrisShaffer]

Congrats, it was fun reading your thread!

 

[WastinTime]

GE attempts:

We tried about 10 times for a GE. Basically every GP after the first two. One was well over 50% odds and the other 9 tries were probably 15-25%. It should have worked that way, however I totally agree that a 100% GE is the way I would go. There was no way I would convince our team to skip the GreatLibrary (I usually do), and that detour of Aesthetics+Lit (before HBR) also cost us in our late start to the wars.

Late to wars:

We were always just a bit late to each party. GK got Keshiks, then we start on Joao with archers and he gets longbows and Elephants. Again, with Dr. Evil, we start with Archers and get longbows midway thru the war. I don't even want to re-live the Goldmember situation, but they seemed to get an upgrade every time we looked down there. First a caravel massacre, then longbows, then berserkers, etc. I actually thought the mapmaker had some fancy script running that would give them tech everytime we poked them. (not joking).

Along the same lines, we also got walls and castles popping up just before we bring the army thru.

So mining was late, but our wars were also about 10 turns too slow. We were always about 5 cities behind where we should be.

 

[WastinTime]

I think avoiding Liberalism hurt you guys in a couple of ways.

One good thing about never planning to take Liberalism:
We were able to give away Edu very very early. In fact I think it was the turn we double-GS bulbed it. That allowed Mansa to research very quickly and get some nice late techs for us. Normally, you can't give Edu away or you lose Liberalism. We had to. It was all we had. And we needed to get Civil Service, etc. for it.

However, once Mansa left it alone for so long we should have considered using it for the free tech...but again, our lack of GE kept us wanting Pacifism.

I need to look closer at the top 2 games, but I currently remain convinced that Mining Inc was the best way to end the game if you can get past the GE generation. That made Communism a rather pointless detour for a short-lived effect. I think someone calculated our combined odds for a GE at well over 95%...probably 99%

 

[bcool]

Well guys, I know it is a bit early to think about the next sgotm. However, I wanted to give everyone a heads up that I taking a break from sgotm. My work has gotten busier in the past couple of years and I don't think I can maintain the focus to participate in a high level game next time.

So if you guys want Kakumeika to survive you might want to start thinking about who is going to be captain next time and recruiting some new members.

Great effort on everyone's part, I'm sorry we didn't get the gold.
I'm not entirely convinced that mining inc was the way to go even if we got the early great engineer, the benefits of a very early communism certainly add up. The lack of food on this map really hurt the growth of our cities.

The difference in the top 3 games will be bit hard to tease out since there were so many choices along the way. Differences in what the AI researched, how they expanded, who they declared war against, etc.

Even if mining inc is the best strategy in the end, a early communism is a very very close second.

 

[Seraiel]

I need to look closer at the top 2 games, but I currently remain convinced that Mining Inc was the best way to end the game if you can get past the GE generation. That made Communism a rather pointless detour for a short-lived effect. I think someone calculated our combined odds for a GE at well over 95%...probably 99%

That one was me and we had way over 100% .

Well guys, I know it is a bit early to think about the next sgotm. However, I wanted to give everyone a heads up that I taking a break from sgotm. My work has gotten busier in the past couple of years and I don't think I can maintain the focus to participate in a high level game next time.

So if you guys want Kakumeika to survive you might want to start thinking about who is going to be captain next time and recruiting some new members.

Great effort on everyone's part, I'm sorry we didn't get the gold.
I'm not entirely convinced that mining inc was the way to go even if we got the early great engineer, the benefits of a very early communism certainly add up. The lack of food on this map really hurt the growth of our cities.

The difference in the top 3 games will be bit hard to tease out since there were so many choices along the way. Differences in what the AI researched, how they expanded, who they declared war against, etc.

Even if mining inc is the best strategy in the end, a early communism is a very very close second.

RL is more important than VL bcool.

Thx for having led the team and enjoy playing Earth on 23709238490237491027590385203017924013571ß039583 x 1309571ß2509172409127390127501925712095 ^^ .